from History and Memory Volume 9, Numbers 1 & 2

On Saul Friedländer

Steven E. Aschheim

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There are few arenas of Western cultural and intellectual life where the ethical, interpretive and political stakes are more charged than in the ongoing analyses and debates concerning the nature and implications of Nazism and the Holocaust. In this powerfully contested field of Shoah historiography and commemoration, Saul Friedländer constitutes a distinctive, always stylish and sophisticated, presence, a peculiarly authoritative custodial voice.1 It is this sense of protective custodianship, the eloquent assertion and defense of the historical and moral centrality, as well as the ultimate inexplicability, of the Holocaust, that animates Friedländer's project and provides unity to his work. At the same time, it is the haunting awareness of the fragility of this centrality that informs his sensitivity to, identification of, and polemic with, those multiple forces constantly operating to undermine, elide or even eradicate its normative standing.

This sensitivity and authority derives from a unique combination of personal and intellectual qualities and biographical circumstances. That this event has indelibly shaped his life, demanding ever-greater reflection and moral and intellectual probity, will be clear to anyone familiar with Friedländer's poignant, elegantly written memoir When Memory Comes (1979). There he portrays, in fragmented form and with almost unbearable restraint, his tale of survival under the Nazis and its effects on his dismembered life: the pain of a Czech Jewish child "abandoned" by parents intent on saving his life by placing him for care in French Catholic hands; the nature of terror and its regressive effects ("and every morning I was sopping wet with urine when I woke up"); the confusion of identity and the consolatory move to Catholicism (in devotion to the Virgin "I rediscovered something of the presence of a mother"); the secret shame ("of having passed over to the compact, invincible majority, of no longer belonging to the camp of the persecuted but, potentially at least, to that of the persecutors"); learning from a compassionate priest of his parents' death and of Auschwitz ("to hear him speak of the lot of the Jews with so much emotion and respect must have been an important encouragement for me"); the rediscovery of his Jewishness (with its immediate, albeit confused, "sensation of absolute loyalty") and the ongoing complexities inherent in the move from Pavel to Sha'ul, from Paul to Saul.2

For all that, Friedländer is seldom associated with those--like Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Jean Améry--whose writings revolve almost exclusively around the questions and problematics of survivorship.3 He somewhat self-deprecatingly describes his choice of career--"to adopt the gaze of the historian"--as a "way out for me to attach myself to the necessary order, the inescapable simplification forced upon one by the passage of time...." 4 Yet his accomplishment rests upon a rare sublimative capacity to both integrate and yet surmount the fact of his personal experience into subtle historical and cultural scholarship. He is alert as few others to the nuances separating and joining the personal and the objective realms, childhood memory ("For me ... Hitler's Reich is always summed up, in one first instant, by two motionless sentinels: not faces but two helmets") and dispassionate history, the tactile-experiential ("The smell of their leather overcoats!") and the analytic dimensions.5 Indeed, these sensitivities have helped to define his role within the culture: as a kind of seismometer consistently identifying, and opening for discussion, emergent interpretive questions and meta-issues surrounding the historiography of the Holocaust.

I would suggest then that it is in the close monitoring of changing cultural and political currents and the rigorous examination of their moral, philosophical and psychological implications for the representation of the Shoah within Western ethical and intellectual discourse that the distinctiveness of Saul Friedländer's work lies.6 This does not mean, of course, that he has neglected the craft of regular narrative history. His first book, a revised version of his dissertation and published in 1963, was a closely documented study of Nazi policies toward, and perceptions of, the United States.7 As the reviewer in the Christian Science Monitor stressed, Friedländer "practices the self-effacing zeal of the scholar in letting the facts and documents speak for themselves.... All is related carefully and dispassionately. Perhaps the most eloquent tribute one can pay to the author is that unless the reader were told, he would never guess from the book that Saul Friedländer's father and mother were caught by the Nazis in 1942 and killed in Auschwitz." 8

Indeed, in his second book, Pius XII and the Third Reich, tellingly subtitled A Documentation, Friedländer insisted that, in the face of bewilderingly opposed positions regarding the relationship of the Catholic Church to the Nazis, the only possibility of honest investigation was "to adhere as far as possible, to the documents." After a thorough examination of the available evidence he concluded with positivistic caution that: "At the end of this study, which claims to be nothing more than an analysis of documents, I cannot make any definite answer to the questions raised by the wartime policies of the Holy See toward the Third Reich because I only have incomplete documents at my disposal." 9 For all that, the thrust of the work is painfully--if implicitly--accusatory.10 It pointedly noted the continuing predilection of the Pope for the Germans even when he was aware of the deadly nature of the Hitler regime--and raised a moral issue always central to Friedländer's concern: how by the end of 1943 could the Church (even given its anti-Bolshevist impulses) continue to wish for victorious resistance in the East "and therefore seemingly accepted by implication the maintenance, however temporary, of the Nazi extermination machine?" 11

There was only one clue in the book that pointed to Friedländer's personal odyssey--the telling dedication: "To the Memory of My Parents Killed at Auschwitz." Only a retrospective reading of the work informed by knowledge of Friedländer's own saving engagement with Catholicism enables one to grasp the pain and poignancy, the caution and restraint, indeed, the ongoing desire for some kind of future redeeming explanation: "The historian, while noting the lacunae, is reduced to the hope that the essential documents he lacks, and particularly the documents of the Vatican archives, soon will be published so that the events and personages can be brought into proper perspective." 12

It is, however, less for his conventional historical work that Friedländer is well known. He has always been particularly alert to the accompanying moral and psychological complexities that accompanied the exterminations (a sensitivity whose origins may well lie in the complexities of his own personal experience). It is especially telling today that, as early as 1967, Friedländer chose a quite "extra-ordinary" German, Kurt Gerstein, as the subject of his only biographical study--a "brutally deadpan historical essay," as one reviewer put it--of what he termed "the ambiguity of good." 13 In a rare act of moral conscience and heroic anti-conformity, Gerstein joined the SS in order to try to impede, and inform the world of, the Final Solution. The story, as Friedländer relates it, is rent with paradoxes and tragic ambiguities: Gerstein shipped more liquid prussic acid than he was able to destroy; he risked his life informing all and sundry about the exterminations but his warnings were ignored; instead of being celebrated as a hero in 1945 he was incarcerated by the French and committed suicide; and in his posthumous Tübingen trial in 1950, the court acknowledged his actions and exonerated him from criminality but condemned him for his ineffectuality, and labeled him as "tainted." Gerstein, Friedländer concluded, was condemned

in effect, for the uselessness of his efforts ... punished, in a way, for not having behaved like the great majority of "good" Germans and waited quietly until all the Jews were dead; paradoxically, the "innocence" of such Germans is contrasted with the "guilt" of a man who was obliged in some degree to accommodate to the crime in order to resist it. This paradox is inherent in any opposition carried on from within against a system such as Nazism, to the extent that it enforces participation in its crimes as a condition of being able to act against them. Under totalitarianism, right must at times seem indistinguishable from wrong, good from evil, the resister from the executioner ... what lends Gerstein's tragic fate its unique character and its full magnitude is the complete passivity of the "others." Had there been in Germany thousands or even hundreds of Gersteins ... then hundreds of thousands of victims undoubtedly would have been saved by these same "official" accomplices of the regime. If these things had happened, all of these Gersteins would have been acknowledged heroes.14

In effect, until this time Friedländer's historical writings had taken on issues that, in some way or another, related to the question of the Nazi extermination of the Jews but had not yet quite touched its causal core: the issue of perpetrator motivation. Throughout, he has stressed that the ultimate singularity of the event lay in its fundamentally transgressive and taboo-breaking nature, in the fact that those who embarked upon and implemented this project went beyond all thinkable limits. Quoting from Hannah Arendt to the effect that the Nazis tried to "determine who should and who should not inhabit the world," Friedländer comments that this "is something no other regime, whatever its criminality, has attempted to do."

In that sense, the Nazi regime attained what is, in my view, some sort of theoretical outer limit: one may envision an even larger number of victims and a technologically more efficient way of killing, but once a regime decides that groups, whatever the criteria may be, should be annihilated there and then and never be allowed to live on Earth, the ultimate has been achieved. This limit, from my perspective was reached only once in modern history: by the Nazis. It goes without saying that one may try to compare Nazi annihilations to other annihilationist policies, that one may look for any number of comparable elements; all this does not exclude the identification of some differences. The aspect just mentioned is what gives the Nazi regime its specificity.15

For Friedländer, such murderous extremity renders "conventional" histories and methodologies unable to grasp the deep structures and motivations of the event. Thus in the 1970s (when such theories were more or less in vogue) Friedländer was powerfully drawn to psychoanalysis and psychohistory as the proper means of addressing and answering these questions.16 The fruits of this approach are to be found in the (never translated) French work, L'antisémitisme nazi: Histoire d'une psychose collective. The burden of his thesis was that Hitler and his genocidal followers shared a collective unconscious fantasy: the Jews constituted a germ and thus had to be eradicated. It was this fantasy that "led to a behavior of identification and purification (a combination well known to students of individual obsessions) whose final form was to be the physical elimination of the Jews, the 'Final Solution'." 17 We need not pause too long to point out the by now familiar difficulties inherent in psychohistory in general and of the Nazi genocide in particular--the entirely speculative nature of the inferences concerning the content and dynamics of the unconscious not only of dead individuals but of entire groups18--because Friedländer himself very soon realized their shortcomings (and with a candor rare amongst scholars later wrote regarding the deficiencies of psychohistory: "My own study of Nazi anti-Semitism poses the same problems"). 19

Though psychohistory was quietly abandoned, Friedländer nevertheless continues to insist upon "an independent psychological residue" as the appropriate level of explanation (unavailable to most conventional approaches), a crucial component for understanding the unprecedented nature of the exterminations. Moreover, he continues to chide historians for regarding the psychological dimension as "a kind of riddle" which they then subsume under--and reduce to--other explanatory categories such as ideological motives or institutional dynamics.20 His writings thus continue to be steeped in an illuminating psychological sensibility. In the last few years (on the basis of his reading of Himmler's famous speech to high-ranking SS officers in Posen on 4 October 1943) Friedländer has invoked the notion of Rausch, a kind of intoxication, as the psychological clue behind the radically transgressive, morality-defying behavior of the perpetrators:

Could one of the components of Rausch itself, as far as killing and exterminations of others are concerned, not be the effect of a growing elation stemming from repetition, from the ever-larger numbers of the killed others?... the perpetrators do not appear anymore as bureaucratic automata, but rather as beings seized by a compelling lust for killing on an enormous scale, driven by some kind of extraordinary elation in repeating the killing of ever-huger masses of people.21

But theorizing about the inner motivations of the perpetrators--a necessarily speculative area--does not take up the bulk of Friedländer's present psychological interests.22 His focus has shifted from the subjects of history to those who perforce must commemorate, culturally reimagine and write it. Those who come after, he insists, will necessarily be enframed within a structure of "trauma" and "transference." The insights thus garnered, it seems to me, are both less speculative and immensely fruitful and, indeed, are applied not only to the work of other researchers in the field but also to his own writings. "The extreme character of the events and the indeterminacy surrounding their historical significance create even for the professional historian a field of projections, of unconscious shapings and reshapings, of an authentic transferential situation." 23 All approaches to this subject, Friedländer insists, possess an inbuilt subjective dimension, and are, at least in part, existentially and transferentially determined.

These kinds of insights formed an integral part of the dazzling correspondence Friedländer conducted with the German historian Martin Broszat. In this, perhaps the exemplary document of a tough, entirely candid, post-Shoah German-Jewish dialogue (of which more later), there arose the question of bias entailed in the respective "German" and "Jewish" national and scholarly representations of the Holocaust. As Friedländer put it there: "This issue ... has not been openly dealt with up to now and it is important for all that it be brought to the surface and clarified." Broszat had argued that, given its victim status and background, "Jewish" historiography and memory must perforce be "mournful and accusatory ... a mythical form of remembrance" that had little to do with the rational, scholarly, "scientific" enterprise.24 It is interesting that in his reply Friedländer did not point out the dubiousness of relating to scholarship in terms of its national background, as "German" or "Jewish." Instead, while accepting the likelihood of some Jewish bias, he generalized his transferential insight. "Wouldn't you agree," he pointedly asked Broszat, "that this German context creates as many problems in the approach to the Nazi era as it does, differently, for the victims?... If we see things from your perspective, why, in your opinion, would historians belonging to the group of the perpetrators be able to distance themselves from their past, whereas those belonging to the group of the victims would not?" 25 "For us," he concluded, "a kind of purely scientific distancing from the past, that is, a passage from the realm of knowledge strongly influenced by personal memory to that of some kind of 'detached history', remains, in my opinion, a psychological and epistemological illusion." 26

Over the years, Friedländer has become a master of the manifold psychological ploys and techniques by which scholarly narratives and collective memory (always carefully differentiated into its victim, perpetrator and other components) seeks to selectively confront--or evade--this essentially "unmastered" (and perhaps unmasterable) past.27 He has identified and analyzed the diverse currents within both "high" and "low" culture that in some (usually unrecognized) way tend to abuse, trivialize, undermine or (to use a ubiquitous term in his lexicon) "neutralize" the scandalous centrality of Nazism and its atrocities.

In his most famous book-length essay on developments within popular culture, on "Kitsch and Death," Friedländer charted the signs of what he took to be not the forgetfulness but rather an essential transvaluation of the memory of National Socialism: "At the end of the war, Nazism was the damned part of Western civilization, the symbol of evil. Everything the Nazis had done was condemned, whatever they touched defiled; a seemingly indelible stain darkened the German past.... By the end of the Sixties, however, the Nazi image in the West had begun to change." In an exercise of decoding Friedländer set out to "understand the logic of this transformation, this reelaboration." Not surprisingly, he emphasized that the key to grasping the new discourse lay in the "autonomous psychological dimension." 28 The attraction to Nazism (not only in the past but in its present reflections) "lay less in any explicit ideology than in the power of emotions, images and phantasms." 29 What attracted contemporaries to the new discourse, with its juxtaposition as well as ultimate fusion of kitsch and death, Friedländer argued, was important not only in itself (as an expression of both continued fears and mute yearnings) but because its profound logic revealed the logic of National Socialism itself, the grip Nazism had exerted in its own day: "a deep structure based on the coexistence of the adoration of power with a dream of final explosion--the annulment of all power ... a particular kind of bondage nourished by the simultaneous desires for absolute submission and total freedom." 30

For Friedländer the new discourse replicated precisely those elements that had formed the basis of attraction to Nazism itself and in so doing crossed a vital barrier of post-Nazi Western sensibility:

Attention has gradually shifted from the reevocation of Nazism as such, from the horror and pain--even if muted by time and transformed into subdued grief and endless meditation--to voluptuous anguish and ravishing images, images one would like to see going on forever. It ... is tuned to the wrong key.... Some kind of limit has been overstepped and uneasiness appears.31

It is, indeed, this very uneasiness that over the years has informed Friedländer's wide-ranging watch over cultural developments ("the massive change," as he puts it, "in the production of the imaginary in Western societies") and the ways in which this has affected emergent representations of Nazism and the Holocaust.32 Whether applied to general interpretive models of National Socialism, the functionalist-intentionalist controversy, the infamous Historikerstreit of the 1980s, the debate over the ramifications of the historicization of National Socialism, or the challenge of postmodernism to historical narrative, Friedländer has always been at the forefront, examining their assumptions and identifying the challenges they pose to the normative notion of Nazism as the transgressive absolute, Auschwitz as "the indelible reference point of the Western imagination." 33

It is this absolute nature of the exterminations, the singularity of the total drive against the Jews, that for Friedländer has consistently constituted the moral and historical bedrock, a datum which, as he put it in 1976, "makes it impossible to integrate ... not only within the general framework of Nazi persecutions, but also within the wider aspects of contemporary ideological-political behavior such as fascism, totalitarianism, economic exploitation and so forth." 34 The validity of the main global interpretations of National Socialism is undermined, according to Friedländer, precisely in relationship to Nazi anti-Semitism and Nazi policies against the Jews, by their inability to incorporate the singularity of the exterminations within their overall explanatory schemes.

In the first place, Friedländer argues, the "functional" accounts that they all invoke in order to explain anti-Semitism break down in the face of genocide. How could the Jews be "functional" enemies when the drive to utterly destroy them was secret, hidden, as far as possible, from the public eye? "For the Nazis, the extermination of the Jews was a fundamental urge and a sacred mission, not a means to other objectives." 35 Moreover in his differentiated analysis regarding levels of explanation, and the distinction between means and motivations, Friedländer demonstrates both the uses and, more critically, the limits of generalized "totalitarian" explanations thus:

This is not to say that the Nazi action against the Jews did not utilize the extreme forms of bureaucratic manipulation and domination which are typical of totalitarian regimes--and on a more diffuse level--of modern society in general. Nor does it mean that the complete disregard for human life and for the value of the individual, so often demonstrated in our century, did not make the Nazi task easier. But these are circumstances which facilitated the exterminatory drive: they do not explain its chief characteristic--its absolutely uncompromising nature.36

As he tersely observed elsewhere "the totalitarian framework is the means of destruction, not its basic explanation." 37 Works like Hannah Arendt's on totalitarianism and (the early) Ernst Nolte's on fascism, while "aware of the centrality and the specificity of the Jewish question within Nazi ideology and practice ... nevertheless built a general theory which, instead of attempting to explain this specificity, disregarded all its main aspects." In a later essay Friedländer sharpened the point thus: "the point is not that such concepts as 'totalitarianism' or 'fascism' seem inadequate for the contextualization of the 'Final Solution,' but, obversely, that these concepts fit much better the particular phenomenon they deal with, once the 'Final Solution' is not included." 38

It is worthwhile noting that Friedländer has never resorted to simple or monocausal explanations of perpetrator motivations (he has always carefully differentiated between the driving ideological, pathological core, and the implementing bureaucratic and field functionaries of murder as well as the outer rim of more or less complicit bystanders). Nor will one find simplistic generalizations as to a murderous national culture or an anti-Semitic character. Extreme racial anti-Semitism, Friedländer wrote well over a decade ago, "certainly fed Hitler's ideology and that of the 'true believers' within the NSDAP, but it offered latent rather than active support to the policies against the Jews ... as far as its prevalence among the general population is concerned." In his account no enthusiastic national executionary drive can be found: "public opinion was not particularly enthusiastic about the anti-Jewish persecutions." 39 And in his new book he writes that "the majority of Germans, although undoubtedly influenced by various forms of traditional anti-Semitism and easily accepting the segregation of the Jews, shied away from widespread violence against them, urging neither their expulsion from the Reich nor their physical annihilation." 40

Indeed, the very relevance of historical continuity as an explanatory factor undergoes critical scrutiny. While Friedländer would agree that Nazi anti-Semitism is explicable only within some kind of German national purview, he specifically points to the difficulties that lie "in assessing the significance of those roots, the relative importance of the völkisch ideology, and the place of anti-Semitic themes and attitudes within German society, be it during the Wilhelmine period or under the Weimar Republic." To be sure, no general interpretation could afford not to include, in some way or another, the factor of national continuity, but "the importance of that background is often difficult to assess." 41 Most crucially, Friedländer is critical even of those narratives that place anti-Jewish impulses at their explanatory center. "The only global historical interpretation which seems to 'fit'," he writes, "is the most traditional one: the incremental effect of an ever-more radical anti-Semitic factor. But even those historians who still remain close to this view have to admit that because of the very nature of Nazi anti-Semitism and the 'Final Solution,' the question of continuity becomes problematic." 42

Friedländer's custodial insistence upon what constitutes the important as opposed to the side issues has never been in doubt. This certainly informs his leading role in the debates over "functionalist" interpretations of Nazism and the Shoah that raged in the 1980s. These harshly severed the ties between the intentional ideological impulses and the political practice of the Nazis. It was not in the preordained ideological aims of Hitler and the Third Reich, the exponents of functionalism held, that the genesis and disposition of its genocidal policies were to be found, but rather in its nonmonolithic, polycratic structure, its structurally inbuilt infighting with its struggle for power and resultant "cumulative radicalism."

The details of the intentionalist-functionalist debate are too well known to require rehearsal here (indeed, at the time of writing a kind of unspoken compromise, a sort of integration between the two character-izes most current approaches). Here we need simply note that Friedländer's "intentionalist" defense was, in the first place, marked by a fair and judicious analysis of the functionalist position. The functionalist analysis, he wrote, fitted "better within the mainstream of modern historiography" and its proponents could "claim, quite correctly, that their position implies a much broader spread of responsibility for the crimes committed than that recognized by the opposite position which considers Hitler as the prime mover and the key authority." Nevertheless, Friedländer hastened to spell out the moral and historiographical implications attendant upon this interpretation: "The image it offers of Nazism is more 'normal,' easier to explain: any group can stumble haphazardly, step by step, into the most extreme criminal behavior ... functionalism confronts us, implicitly, with Hannah Arendt's thesis of the 'banality of evil'." Functionalism, too, thus assumed for Friedländer a neutralizing impulse, one that overlooked or even denied "that it is Nazi anti-Semitism and the anti-Jewish policies of the Third Reich that gave Nazism an essential part of its sui generis character." 43

Friedländer's sensitivity to these kinds of elisions was very much in evidence in his prominent role in, and analyses of, the by now infamous Historikerstreit of the 1980s. There is no need to repeat here the nature of the debate, the ways in which the work of historians like Andreas Hillgruber and, more notoriously, Ernst Nolte, seemed to mirror larger political and cultural desires in Germany to somehow "normalize" German identity, by placing the Nazi past within more relative, comparative and easily empathic frameworks.44

While Friedländer acutely dissected the historiographical content and biases of these works, his most distinctive contribution revolved around an analysis of the implications entailed in this shift of perspective. Given the historically unprecedented nature of the crimes, he argued, the ultimate question--of concern to all approaches to National Socialism--was the issue of responsibility. For all their differences, Friedländer noted, the traditional Sonderweg (the special path of German history) and "totalitarian" narratives were "liberal" in nature, viewing Hitler, the Nazi Party, the SS and its bureaucratic instruments as essentially responsible, while the bystanders (most of German society) had at least some partial knowledge of crimes committed and were thus guilty of sustained indifference and passivity. "In terms of self-perception within contemporary West German society," he wrote, "this narrative implies the recognition of a basic historical responsibility both anchored in the pre-Hitler past and having found its expression in the events which occurred during the Third Reich. The overall background for the events may well be found in various trends in European history, but the immediate supporting system is firmly rooted in German soil. After the war, this representation shaped official German memory, as well as Western memory in general." 45

Moreover, he argued, even if the structuralist-functionalist account ended up "with a somewhat paradoxical image of mass murder of a totally unprecedented kind being enacted without any clear representation of a primary locus of responsibility," like the older liberal narratives it was still very much concerned with the issue. All focused "on the fundamental responsibility of the perpetrators as a German group within a system, the roots of which were to be found within German society." Whatever had divided the older approaches, Friedländer acutely noted, "some kind of implicit moral stand suffused the representation of the past and the criminality of the system was perceived from the viewpoint of the victims." 46

To be sure, like the Historikerstreit historians, the classical "totalitarian" approach employed an essentially comparative method but it did not, Friedländer insisted, entail relativization because, as he correctly identified its informing tacit assumption, it "ultimately maintained the Nazi case as the nec plus ultra, in relation to which the other crimes were measured." All the traditional approaches had--at least implicitly--set the criminal dimensions at center stage. That did not mean that their history was written from the known outcome backwards. Nevertheless, the authors as well as their readers agreed that "the sense of those twelve years was to be found in its catastrophic dimension." 47 All, explicitly or implicitly, distanced themselves from the object of study and there was no hint of relativizing Nazi crimes in any way. A moral consensus had obtained.

Now, Friedländer argued, conservative German historians like Nolte, Hillgruber and Joachim Fest had fundamentally shifted the established forms of reference and questioned "the specificity of Nazi crimes in order, essentially, to contextualize the problem of historical responsibility and thereby to solve the issue of German identity within a traditional national mode." 48 In Nolte's ascription of the Holocaust to "a reaction born out of the anxiety of the annihilating consequences of the Russian revolution," the "traditional perpetrator of the early narratives becomes a potential victim" and "the source of all evil is placed outside of the traditional framework for the representation of historical responsibility." 49

Friedländer explicitly distinguished the challenge of historicization from the work of the above historians. Still, he argued, by its emphases on the importance of social transformations and on the continuities of daily life, it "challenges the traditional view of the Nazi epoch which mainly focuses, in the last instance, on the political sphere and on its criminal dimension." It seeks, he wrote in his earliest article on the subject, to cancel

the distance from the object of study which historians imposed upon themselves, quite naturally, when studying Nazism; it aims at reinserting the Nazi phenomenon into normal historical narrative, that is, at relativizing what still makes it appear as singular.... The main thrust of the arguments for historicization is ... to do away with the black-and-white picture of the Nazi era ... by focusing on the bravery of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern front instead of the murderous core of the system, by following diverse social processes rather than the already "well-known" decisions taken in Berlin, there is the possibility that the core be left empty and relegated to the area of antiquated questions, too obsessively studied in the past. The new focus substantially changes the landscape and something--possibly the essential--becomes blurred.50

The champions of historicization presented their revision as if they were transcending the traditional, moralistic, black-and-white, partly mythical historiography of National Socialism and stepping into the domain of a supposed "objective" or "scientific" history. But this, Friedländer wrote, was naive. In effect, these historians were merely proposing an alternative narrative, dominated by a different agenda. The contending views could not be settled in historiographical terms, for they were determined by sets of a priori values.

Friedländer identified Martin Broszat as the main scholarly exemplar of this impulse and it was, indeed, in the wake of the Historikerstreit and Broszat's "Plea for the Historicization of National Socialism," that their quite extraordinary correspondence took place.51 It is a document that stands alone in the annals of the post-Shoah German-Jewish dialogue. Most have either been sycophantic or, like the strained and defensive letters between Hermann Broch and Volkmar von Zuehlsdorff in the immediate postwar years, mutually uncomprehending, apologetic and accusatory. The remarkable and prolonged exchange of views between Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt was not marred by such a lack of mutual empathy--as an early attempt to try to penetrate the depths of the Nazi evil it has no peer--but it was perhaps their very closeness, the proximity of views, that precluded the productive tensions that illuminate the Broszat-Friedländer correspondence.52 As Friedländer put it when the dialogue came to an end:

The inner tension, which, to various degrees, accompanied our exchange of letters, may have been, among other things, the expression of a fundamental commitment to the values which have prompted both of us to devote our entire professional lives to the study of the Nazi epoch. This tension does not stem from a divergence in basic values, but from differences in perspectives which, nevertheless, appear to us to be of major importance.53

The correspondence is characterized by a self-conscious understanding of the special, peculiarly charged, nature of their post-Shoah conversation. Friedländer articulated it thus: "The fundamental difficulty of such a dialogue remains ... and is compounded by the layers of ritualized behavior and gross interests which cover it.... Some measure of openness belongs to our 'experiment' and this openness, as you yourself noted, is the only possible basis for a true German-Jewish dialogue." 54 Refreshingly shorn of apologetics and with striking sophisticated candor, these two masters took up vital issues that until then had been submerged, outlawed as too sensitive for cross-national academic dialogue.

The letters dealt with numerous issues but at their animating center stood the question of the place of Auschwitz. Broszat explicitly acknowledged its crucial importance within the Western moral economy. "A point is reached in confronting the singular event of Auschwitz," he wrote, "where scientific comprehensibility and explicability doubtless are far outstripped by the sheer epochal significance of the event." But he also pointed out the historiographical danger that derived from this centrality, "an attempt to unfurl the entire history of the Third Reich in reverse fashion backwards starting from Auschwitz, instead of unfolding its development in a forward direction, in keeping with historical methodology." Moreover, he noted, the ease of the liquidations was made possible precisely because it was not in the limelight of events, because it was able to be concealed and kept quiet:

It is evident that the role of Auschwitz in the original historical context of action is one that is significantly different from its subsequent importance in terms of later historical perspective. The German historian too will certainly accept that Auschwitz--due to its singular significance--functions in retrospection as the central event of the Nazi period. Yet qua scientist and scholar, he cannot readily accept that Auschwitz also be made, after the fact, into the cardinal point, the hinge on which the entire factual complex of historical events of the Nazi period turns. He cannot simply accept without further ado that this entire complex of history be moved into the shadow of Auschwitz--yes, that Auschwitz even be made into the decisive measuring-rod for the historical perception of this period.55

Friedländer has never doubted that Auschwitz should indeed be made the measuring-rod of the period, and his answers in this respect were tuned to that ongoing sensitivity:

I agree with you that the historian, as historian, cannot consider the Nazi era from its catastrophic end only ... we have to start at the beginning and follow the manifold paths as they present themselves, including numerous developments within German society which had little to do with Auschwitz, and this throughout the history of the era. But the historian knows the end.... This knowledge should not hamper the exploration of all the possible avenues and interpretations, but it compels the historian to choose the central elements around which his unfolding narrative is implicitly built. In short, we come back to the problem of focus.56

Moreover, Friedländer insisted that "although the destruction of the Jews may have been a minor point in the perceptions and policies of the Allies during the war, it seems, more and more, that it loomed as a hidden but perceived fact in many German minds, during the war itself ... indeed, normal life with the knowledge of ongoing massive crimes committed by one's own nation and one's own society is not so normal after all...." 57 (In his reply Broszat hastened to point out that his call for the historicization of National Socialism was "a plea for normalization of the method, not of the evaluation.") 58

Friedländer later reflected "that the ultimate significance of [Broszat's] plea and of the debates that followed was, in the most general sense, about memory itself." 59 Indeed, a great deal of Friedländer's personal and professional life has been concerned with analyzing its mediated, complex dynamics.60 He is a master of the manifold ways in which the "memory" of National Socialism continues to be molded and refashioned according to changing modes of collective and personal self-understanding and mobilized and manipulated by divergent political interests and psychological needs.61 No one has more acutely mapped the major strategies of its appropriation and canonization or the guiles and techniques of its repression, neutralization and displacement.

Yet, given his sense of the complexities, his thought is torn between documenting National Socialism's irrepressible role "as a past that will not go away" and an anxiety that it will disappear from viable memory. There is an internal tension between his fear that with the passing of living personal memories the event will fade into a kind of ritualized oblivion, and the conviction that something "in the nature of the events themselves gives it some of its apparent irreducibility and therefore of its persistence." He has chronicled the well-nigh universal recognition of Nazism as the great transgressive moment of Western civilization yet noted that the catastrophe "has not been incorporated into any compelling framework of meaning in public consciousness." 62

Friedländer is best at dissecting the ways in which this limit-event operates within various national moral economies, political ideologies and collective identities.63 Of course, this most critically applies to German and Jewish memory where, as Friedländer puts it, "the representation of this past has a present dimension of major importance." 64 While perhaps best known for his watchful eye over the developing gyrations of "perpetrator" memory ("For the last forty years, Germans belonging to at least two generations have been caught between the impossibility of remembering and the impossibility of forgetting"),65 Friedländer has also cast a watchful eye over modes of Israeli commemoration. He has written insightfully on the ideologically interested nature of Shoah inscriptions and their uses and abuses within Israeli society.66 He has analyzed their "canonic" functions (the political appropriation of the Holocaust as a mobilizing, justifying myth bolstering an ultranationalist mystique) as well as its "subversive" uses (its employment as a "comparative" tool to criticize Israeli occupation policies). He has observed the close ties between the state of war and the centrality of the Shoah within national narration. He has strongly stated that it would be tragic if "the memory of catastrophes and particularly of the Holocaust will be so deeply ingrained in Jewish collective consciousness as to become an impediment to the progress toward peace." 67 Yet, perhaps because of his sense of national identification (complex and ironic though it may be) and an awareness that, regardless of its manipulations and abuses, these are nevertheless narratives of the victims, he has always tended to keep such critical remarks rather low-keyed, and his analytic attention and acuity focused elsewhere.

It will come as no surprise to learn that Friedländer has written far more intensively and anxiously about the question of German memory (as we already have had occasion to see). The reason for this is clear: "The representation of the Nazi epoch cannot be considered as already beyond the pale of relevant historical consciousness. It remains an imperative knowledge not only for its own sake or for understanding the scope of criminal human potentialities, but more directly in terms of present-day political responsibility." 68

For all that, the most illuminating aspect of his ruminations on public memory and collective identity are those concerned with the subtle interdependencies between "perpetrators" and "victims":

On a symbolic level ... one may speak of a Jewish memory of Auschwitz and of a German one. Although the incompatibility between these two memories may be growing, they are helplessly interwoven in what has been called a "negative symbiosis".... Any re-elaboration of one memory directly impinges on the other; any neutralization casts an overall shadow of oblivion. Neither Jews nor Germans can relate to their own memory without relating to the other's as well.69

Friedländer is, of course, aware that this model is too simplistic and that no monolithic "German" or "Jewish" collective memory can be unequivocally located; differentiations and nuances are to be found on and between both sides. Still, was not this kind of tension and dynamic exemplified in the exchange with Broszat and does it not, to some degree or another, reverberate each time the fragile cultural, political, economic and historiographical relationship between the two groups is called into question?

"Memory" is, of course, expressed in diverging and competing modes of representation and historical narration and, given Friedländer's sensitivities and priorities, it should come as no great surprise that it was he who was instrumental in bringing to the fore and raising for discussion the manifold ways in which postmodernism has affected discussion concerning the Final Solution. 70 Postmodernism with its rejection, as Friedländer puts it, "of the possibility of identifying some stable reality or truth beyond the constant polysemy and self-referentiality of linguistic constructs challenges the need to establish the truth and realities of the Holocaust." 71 He demonstrates how this decidedly ironic epistemological sensibility and its accompanying "disconnection between moral judgment, aesthetic norms, and intellectual analysis," tends to undermine what he tellingly describes as the natural "monumental-didactic" narrative structure of the prevalent paradigm and erodes the normative moral and symbolic status of Nazism within the culture.72 He takes issue with a postmodernist positing of "reality" as essentially embodied in (if not entirely created by) narrative emplotments and rhetorical modes and choices. "It is," he argues, "the reality and significance of modern catastrophes that generate the search for a new voice and not the use of a specific voice which constructs the significance of these catastrophes." 73

Yet, if for Friedländer postmodernism problematizes the grounds of Holocaust historiography, it also renders it more critically self-conscious and, indeed, provides some subtle modes for its expansion and refinement. He notes some of its possible benefits and advantages thus: "the very openness of postmodernism to what cannot yet be formulated in decisive statements, but merely sensed, directly relates to whoever considers that even the most precise historical renditions of the Shoah contain an opaqueness at the core which confronts traditional historical narrative." 74 We should not be blind, then, to a certain affinity, an implicit sympathy, that Friedländer evinces toward this approach. This is so because various aspects of this sensibility reinforce Friedländer's continuing insistence upon the limits of understanding, "the unease in interpretation," the ultimate inaccessibility and inexplicability of this transgressive event. This emphasis on the essential opacity of the Final Solution demands critical attention for it stands at the core of much of his work.

Few people have written more suggestively, provided such rich insights into the structure of Nazism as Friedländer. Yet, unlike (for example) Raul Hilberg's "process and machinery of destruction," Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil," Christopher Browning's "ordinary men" or, even, Daniel Goldhagen's "ordinary Germans," he offers no unifying explanatory scheme nor, indeed, would he want his work to be subsumed into any general theoretical framework. This is a principled resistance. Indeed, as we have seen, one of the motivating aspects of his thinking has been to demonstrate the ways in which the radical singularity of the event makes it impossible to persuasively integrate it into any global historiographical interpretation and, indeed, unamenable to conventional explanation. The unknown, he writes, "is not being assimilated by the known; the unprecedented, although constantly drawing upon precedent motifs and images, is not transformed into new understanding; the imaginative leap has only partly succeeded; the mind is not at rest." 75

It is true that Friedländer often claims that the extrication of a "rational historiography" is "ever necessary." Indeed, he has written: "The extermination of the Jews of Europe is as accessible to both representation and interpretation as any other historical event." 76 Already in 1976, he was quite aware that the positing of a radical singularity opened the way to charges that it was "an anomaly of history which may have the utmost significance on a theological or even philosophical level, but falls outside the scope of any historical interpretation. By trying to escape the banalization of the Holocaust through the use of inadequate generalizations or outright evasions, do we not fall into the other extreme, that of making the Holocaust an event so unique in human history that we cannot give it any signification whatsoever?" His answer, then, was that if the Shoah resisted these explanatory and contextual generalizations, it was "nevertheless the result of cumulative historical trends which, can, in part at least, be identified and explained." 77

Of late--in ways that conform closely to a postmodernist sensibility and which satisfy the issues of historicization debated with Martin Broszat--he has even programmatically set out the ground-rules for an improved, more sensitive historical narrative in which a certain critical self-awareness remains cardinal and in which the voice of the commentator is explicitly present:

The commentary should disrupt the facile linear progression of the narration, introduce alternative interpretations, question any partial conclusion, withstand the need for closure. Because of the necessity of some form of narrative sequence ... such commentary may introduce splintered or constantly recurring refractions of a traumatic past by using any number of vantage points.

The dimension added by the commentary may allow for an integration of the so-called mythic memory of the victims within the overall representation of this past without its becoming an obstacle to rational historiography. For instance, whereas the historical narrative may have to stress the ordinary aspects of everyday life during most of the twelve years of the Nazi epoch, the "voice-over" of the victims' memories may puncture such normality, at least at the level of commentary.78

For all that, Friedländer's most distinctive efforts have been expended on demonstrating the difficulties, perhaps even the principled impossibilities, of this "ever-elusive goal" of rational historiography.79 He even goes so far as to say that "even if new forms of historical narrative were to develop, or new modes of representation, and even if literature and art were to probe the past from unexpected vantage points, the opaqueness of some 'deep memory' would probably not be dispelled." 80 For, as he repeatedly insists, "we are dealing with an event which tests our traditional conceptual and representational categories, an 'event at the limits'." 81

In effect, Friedländer's analyses of such opacity, the sources of this ultimate unintegrability and inexplicability, are numerous, even overdetermined. The basis of incomprehension derives in the first place from the nature of the event itself. For it broke "the most fundamental of all taboos: the Nazi perpetration of systematic, prolonged extermination of categories of human beings considered as nonhuman. Such behavior causes instinctive repulsion at the level of the species as well as that of the individual. The very disappearance of these psychological (or sociobiological) barriers concerning the 'scientific' mass killing of other human beings represents, it seems to me, the first and foremost issue for which our usual categories of interpretation are insufficient." 82

It is not only the event itself, but the protective neutralizing responses to the event that similarly reinforce and express the limits of understanding. Fifteen years ago Friedländer wrote that

systematic historical research, which uncovers the facts in their most precise and most meticulous interconnection, also protects us from the past, thanks to the inevitable paralysis of language. That is the exorcism and the involuntary evasion to which we are all subject and whose mechanism has to be taken apart.... In some ways the scholarly mind does not allow an emotional reaction. It is blocked and immediately replaced by a problem drawn from the text.... And paralysis of language aside, what is the fundamental characteristic of this exorcism? To put the past back into bearable dimensions, superimpose it upon the known and respected progress of human behavior, put it into the identifiable course of things, into the unmysterious march of ordinary history, into the reassuring world of the rules that are the basis of our society.... There should be no misunderstanding about what I am trying to say: The historian cannot work in any other way, and historical studies have to be pursued along the accepted lines. The events described are what is unusual, not the historian's work. We have reached the limits of our means of expression. Others we do not possess.83

More recently, Friedländer has argued that the "historian can analyze the phenomenon from the 'outside,' but, in this case, his unease stems from the incongruence between intellectual probing, and the blocking of intuitive comprehension of events that happened more or less during his or her lifetime, within his or her society." 84 Our understanding of the basic transgressive moving forces--such as the elation that animated the perpetrators and which was created by the very dimensions of the killing--is simply blocked at the level of self-awareness.

Indeed, perhaps most compellingly, and controversially, Friedländer argues that the unease, the exorcisms, neutralizations and interpretive rationalizations are not only post factum responses but (as in the commitment to secrecy) were built into the event, practiced by the Nazis themselves. "It is a neutralization in which we all take part and which ... began in a certain way at the heart of the Nazi phenomenon itself, even as the extermination was at its height." 85 In parallel fashion, our own "paralysis of comprehension" is a kind of mirror of the inability of bystanders and victims themselves to grasp what was transpiring.

I would suggest that Friedländer's emphasis upon this meta-level, what he calls the "undefined but clearly felt limits to interpretation," the need for "a sense of self-restraint about the available repertoire" 86 derives less from methodological or even historiographical concerns than from essentially moral ones. Nothing disturbs him more than "the danger of breaking the barrier of the imagination that is Auschwitz." 87 His insistence upon radical singularity has entailed adopting a strategy of what can be dubbed (in almost Adornian terms) as a kind of "negative incommensurability," a built-in resistance to meaning and lesson-drawing. He underlines that there is nothing commensurable with the enormity of the event that this past can teach us. Despite the many tomes seeking to do so, it does not significantly instruct us about the nature of "industrial society" or "modernity": the "linkages are kept at such a level of generality that they are irrelevant or the contradictions become insuperable." 88 And while it is easy to draw a universally valid significance from the Shoah, the "difficulty appears when this statement is reversed. No universal lesson seems to require reference to the Shoah to be fully comprehended." 89

"Paradoxically," Friedländer writes, the very exceptionality of the Final Solution makes it "inaccessible to all attempts at a significant representation and interpretation," perhaps rendering it "fundamentally irrelevant for the history of humanity and the understanding of the 'human condition'." 90 Again, paradoxically, this incapacity to yield meaning--a judgment which Friedländer notes "applies also to my own work" 91--flows either from a "blankness" or from what he terms "an excess," defined approvingly in Lyotardian terms as "'something [that] remains to be phrased which is not, something which is not determined'." 92 When Friedländer quotes Maurice Blanchot to the effect that "working through" consists of the effort "to keep watch over absent meaning" he is, in effect, defining a crucial part of his own project.93

Given these kinds of pronouncements and a repeated emphasis on the opaque core of the matter, Friedländer's custodianship has been viewed by some critics as increasingly assuming the nature of a defensive "holding operation," an exercise in special pleading. As Martin Broszat put it in their exchange:

I wonder whether your skepticism necessarily has to burden our discourse with such a high degree of suspicion, which I can repeatedly sense behind your comments and remarks.... Haven't you yourself staked out such definite positions in your suspicious distrust of possible tendencies toward trivialization and minimization in dealing with the Nazi period in the work of German historians ... that you are no longer able to break free from and abandon these positions, even here in this exchange of letters? ... haven't you also erected a fence around yourself, one which only permits you "some measure of openness"? 94

For "bread-and-butter" historians Friedländer's utterances regarding "absent meaning," "opaqueness at the core," and so on, may well appear rather vague, too allusive (if not outright elusive), indeed almost mystificatory. To be sure, Friedländer's strictures on closure--consonant with postmodernism's suspicion of totalizing history--are unexceptionable (though one would want to ask whether, in any area of historical inquiry characterized by its dynamic nature, such closures ever actually occur.) The Shoah was indeed a radically new occurrence characterized by a lack of comprehension and a stunned Begriffslosigkeit. But novelty is not equivalent to inexplicability. The unprecedented may simply require new (and increasingly refined) categories and tools of understanding and should not necessarily be regarded as in principle inaccessible. There are many historians who simply will not accept that this object of study must perforce remain "indeterminate, elusive, and opaque." 95

Would it be unreasonable to argue that the Final Solution was a secular, human event that occurred at a particular, identifiable time and place and that--while always keeping the radical and unprecedented dimensions of the event clearly in mind--it should be equally amenable to the rules and methods that govern the (increasingly refined and self-reflexive) practice of historiography in general? To be sure, most historians would agree that no event can ever be fully grasped from "within," that we can never arrive at some form of "ultimate knowledge." By and large, the craft is animated by the conviction that comprehensibility is a finite, changing and plural, rather than a single, final state. "In one sense," Michael Marrus writes, "the Holocaust will forever be ... 'unimaginable.' Yet ... much the same could be said, mutatis mutandis, about many other things as well.... Historians are used to trampling over their fields while suspending judgements on the fundamental issues that are ultimately at stake.... We simply do the best we can, knowing that our efforts are necessarily imperfect, incomplete and inadequate." 96

Moreover, given the inevitable dynamic, the inbuilt shifts in historical perspective that come naturally with time and changing contemporary experience (as well the imperatives of the historical profession), in a matter as complex, loaded and dense as the Shoah, no theoretical or methodological orthodoxy, no holding operation, can possibly be expected to pertain.97 The matter will continue to be fluid and marked by a plurality of approaches and perspectives even if Friedländer is correct to darkly write that the sheer diversification, complexity and multitude of studies of the Nazi era tend "to erase the sharp outlines of certain central issues, be they conceptual or ethical. Therefore, whether one wishes it or not, the very momentum of historiography may serve to neutralize the past." 98 One could argue against this position and claim that the very problematization of the past and the vital debates it generates will keep the memory most relevantly alive ("the surest engagement with memory," James Young has written, "lies in its perpetual irresolution"). 99 At any rate, despite--or perhaps because of--its attendant difficulties, the very magnitude of Auschwitz has rendered inevitable a plethora of attempts at interpretive historical comprehension. "After fifty years," Arno Mayer writes, "the question is no longer whether or not to reappraise and historicize the Judeocide, but rather how to do so responsibly." 100

Mayer's own attempt to contextualize the Final Solution within a larger global historical interpretation was, indeed, far from satisfactory.101 But, it seems to me, attempts of this kind do not necessarily, as Friedländer suggests in various places, have to be doomed in principle. Could not one, for instance, persuasively relate it to the overall, imperial vision of the racial Nazi State with its grandiose bio-eugenic policies of mass resettlement and enslavement, its interlinked measures combining philo-regenerative "positive" programs for the Volksgemeinschaft with a series of increasingly radical measures against "abnormal" and "unwanted" elements? The mass sterilizations, the euthanasia program, the murder and persecutions of the Gypsies, the "asocials" and the homosexuals are only comprehensible within the informing framework of such a bio-eugenic framework. It also informed the massive repopulation programs. Himmler's Generalplan Ost envisaged shifting 31 million non-Germans across Eastern Europe not only in order to get rid of such "inferior" peoples but also to facilitate the resettlement of Germans and Volksdeutsche.102 Indeed, in inextricable fashion, the murderous impulses of Auschwitz arose within the context of an overall plan to ethnically "purify," reconstruct and re-Germanize the surrounding upper Silesian areas. Himmler viewed towns such as Auschwitz, Blachstadt, and Saybusch as relics of medieval German colonization and sought to convert these into model ecological, urban and architectural centers.103

Many historians are currently arguing that it is within this informing bio-eugenic context that the extermination of the Jews needs to be located. To be sure, total extermination was reserved exclusively for the Jews--and Friedländer is correct always to emphasize the specificity of what he has recently called "redemptive" anti-Semitism, "this synthesis of a murderous rage and an idealistic goal, shared by the Führer and the hard core of the party." 104 "The criminal dimension," he wrote in 1976, "is certainly the same in every case of genocide, be the victims Armenians, Jews or Tutsis; the attempt at total physical eradication may sometimes be identical, but the motivations are quite different; in that sense, the Nazi exterminatory drive against the Jew remains unmistakably singular." 105 But placing this drive within a more global context and theory does not necessarily weaken the claim--indeed it may sharpen our understanding and explain the major enabling preconditions. Thus the imperial bio-eugenic framework may help to explain how such anti-Semitic impulses were able to take on precisely the character upon which Friedländer insists: its entirely novel, systematically genocidal form. In this view, killing the Jews was not something separate from but triggered by--the outer edge yet an integral part of--this total, transgressive vision of racial community.

To be sure, Friedländer does indeed write about, and is sensitive to, these overall brutalizing forces and the other victimizing programs of National Socialism. But he insists that these were in no way causally linked to the Final Solution. Despite the fact that they were roughly simultaneous and parallel developments, they were quite separate policies, characterized by "different origins and different aims." 106 He does state that these ideological trends reinforced each other, that "the separateness and compatibility of both the specific anti-Jewish and the general racial and eugenic trends were at the very center of the Nazi system." 107 But this is a point of view which is simply suggested and which is never quite integrated into the fabric of his narrative. Friedländer's commitment to the totality and singularity of the drive against the Jews has resulted in a refusal to locate it within such an informing bio-eugenic framework, a framework that while it contextualizes matters differently in no way undermines the special pathology directed against the Jews.108

Wulf Kansteiner has recently pitted Friedländer's historiographic strategy of "exceptionality" against the backdrop of what he sees as an opposite, developing trend that regards Nazism and the Shoah as exemplifications of wider processes, integrable and explicable within larger contexts, comparable to other historical events and able to illuminate a variety of theoretical and political issues. Friedländer's dictum concerning the inaccessibility of significant representation and interpretation, Kansteiner argues, his notion that the only truth of the Final Solution is its extraordinary resistance to rationalizations of any kind, necessarily results in a paradox. While the new contextualism "naturalizes" the event in order to circumvent the concept of the Holocaust's incomprehensibility, Friedländer takes up "an impossible task, the attempt to stabilize and defend an interpretive void." 109

We shall come back to this matter in a moment but before doing so should note that even if for Friedländer the history of the Holocaust must ultimately remain opaque, he himself is nevertheless constantly engaged in the attempt to write it--as his powerful new narrative, replete with persuasive "positive" interpretations, amply demonstrates. This should not be regarded as a damning contradiction but rather as a productive tension in his work. There is no reason why his thought on meta-matters should always neatly dovetail with the narrative content of his concrete history (indeed, as we have seen, Friedländer has consistently applied his metacritical observations to his own work).

Yet, beyond this, there is something about the nature of his custodianship, his detection of biases, the battles he wages, the level and focus of his analyses, and the values he upholds that constitutes a unique and indispensable cultural presence. It may or may not be that this "holding operation," "keeping watch over absent meaning" will prove to be a Sisyphean task. But its eloquent insistencies--morally sensitive, ethically tuned, yet never cloying, evasive or self-righteous--are nevertheless vital to the slippery interpretive processes whereby Western, German and Jewish collectivities continually recall, contest, commemorate and elide their catastrophic past. Saul Friedländer is a consummate analyst of these worlds--and a master of a discipline that should never have come to be.

Notes

1. "It would be ridiculous," writes Dominick LaCapra, "if I tried to assume the voice of Elie Wiesel or of Saul Friedländer. There is a sense in which I have no right to these voices ... while any historian must be 'invested' in a distinctive way in the events of the Holocaust, not all investments (or cathexes) are the same, and not all statements, rhetorics, or orientations are equally available to different historians." See his "Reflections on the Historians' Debate," in idem, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, 1994), 46.

2. When Memory Comes (New York, 1979), 45, 120-22, 137-38, respectively (first published in French in 1978). As Leon Wieseltier put it in his review, the most remarkable feature of the work is "its composure, an elegance that is unnerving ... his language seems armored (even more formidably so in the French) against the dissolution he describes. Yet dissolution triumphs. The pieces of memory do not cohere.... Friedländer's life remains disrupted, despoiled of its dreams; not least because of the honesty with which he has attempted to discover what the death of the Jews might mean.... Even the structure of his memoir thus seems disconsolate; he refuses to impose narrative order upon his account of the catastrophes...." See "Between Paris and Jerusalem," New York Review of Books 26, no. 16 (25 Oct. 1979): 3-4.

3. Of course, unlike these writers, Friedländer was never placed in a Nazi camp.

4. When Memory Comes, 144.

5. Ibid., 29 and 37 respectively.

6. This essay is an attempt to elaborate on some of the suggestions I make in my Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York, 1996), 115-16 and 192 n. 6.

7. Hitler et les États-Unis (1939-1941) (Geneva, 1963). English translation: Prelude to Downfall: Hitler and the United States, 1939-1941 (New York, 1966). For an overview of Friedländer's career, writings and reviews thereof through 1994, see Contemporary Literary Criticism 90: 98-123.

8. Edwin Tetlow, "Of Diplomatic Thrust and Counterthrust," Christian Science Monitor, 15 Dec. 1967, 13.

9. Pius XII and the Third Reich: A Documentation (New York, 1966), xv and 236 respectively (first published in French in 1964). (Here and elsewhere emphasis is in the original.)

10. This, indeed, was the burden of a hostile review which argued that given the lack of availability of all the documents, selections were necessary. "But the act of selection is, conversely, the act of exclusion.... Inevitably, it must appear that he is not engaged in an objective scholarly inquiry so much as in grinding an ax." Given Friedländer's emphasis on the partial nature of the documents, the reviewer asks: "Why did he not wait until he had more material and could venture definite answers, rather than rush into print now with nothing more than conjectures and insinuations?" See E. H. Wall, "Tragic Dilemma," National Review 28 (23 Aug. 1966): 843-44.

11. Pius XII, 236-37.

12. Ibid., 238.

13. Kurt Gerstein: The Ambiguity of Good (New York, 1969) (first published in French in 1967). See review by Arthur A. Cohen in New York Times Book Review, 13 Apr. 1969, 10.

14. The quotes are culled from Kurt Gerstein, 226-28 (original emphasis). See generally the "Final Remarks." If most critics were struck by the restrained nature of this book, this was not true for all. Thus Norbert Muhlen complained that Friedländer "attempts to set himself up as a supreme moral judge of the large majority of people as well as of Gerstein himself. Given his hostile personal bias and his superficial treatment of moral as well as factual questions, which he often answers by cut-rate psychoanalysis and by comic-strip-styled oversimplifications ... he appears poorly equipped for such a final judgment. His ambiguous verdict on the 'ambiguity of good' remains as meaningless as its fashionable model and companion piece, Hannah Arendt's banal charge against the 'banality of evil'." See Norbert Muhlen, America 120, no. 15 (12 Apr. 1969): 455. The suggestion about some kind of relation to Arendt is interesting though asserted not argued. Would it be unfair to suggest that the tone of the critique, written by a German-born American journalist, who points out that Friedländer is "an Israeli historian" may serve as an early example of Friedländer's analyses of the tensions between "German" and "Jewish" memory?

15. See "Reflections on the Historicization of National Socialism," in Friedländer's collection of essays, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington, 1993), 82-83. Quoting from Arendt's concluding lines of Eichmann in Jerusalem, his comment that "Hannah Arendt may have unintentionally given us a clue as to what distinguished Nazi crimes from others" is mysterious. There was nothing unintentional about it--in fact it formed a cornerstone of Arendt's thinking on this point.

16. Apart from Friedländer, perhaps the best-known attempt in this (very well plowed) field is the concluding chapter ("A Case-study in Collective Psychology") of Norman Cohn's Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London, 1967). Interestingly, Cohn later omitted this chapter in a revised edition claiming that he now regarded his own interpretation as "somewhat primitive" and in its stead recommended Friedländer's more "adequate" work.

17. L'antisémitisme nazi: Histoire d'une psychose collective (Paris, 1971).

18. The most bizarre example of this rather large literature is Rudolf Binion's "Hitler's Concept of Lebensraum: The Psychological Basis," History of Childhood Quarterly 1, no. 2 (Fall 1973), where the Holocaust is related to Hitler's perception that the Jewish doctor, Dr. Bloch, was responsible for his mother's death. All speculative psychological considerations aside, the plausibility of this theory, one would think, is somewhat dented by the fact that Hitler went out of his way to protect Dr. Bloch! See also Jacob Katz's illuminating comments on psychohistory in general and Friedländer's work in particular, "Misreadings of Anti-Semitism," Commentary (July 1983): 39-44, esp. 40-41.

19. See Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (1984; New York, 1986), 121 (first published in French in 1982). See also his earlier, critically nuanced, general study, History and Psychoanalysis: An Enquiry into the Possibilities and Limits of Psychohistory (New York, 1978) (first published in French in 1975).

20. See his important and revealing essay, "The 'Final Solution': On the Unease in Historical Interpretation," in Peter Hayes, ed., Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston, IL, 1991), 23-35; quotes on 25.

21. Ibid., 30.

22. Whether "simple" or "complex" in their nature, such theories are never "immediate" reflections of an unmediated historical reality but are inevitably shaped by a degree of ascriptive, and speculative, interpretation. See my "Archetypes and the German-Jewish Dialogue: Reflections Occasioned by the Goldhagen Affair," German History 15, no. 2 (1997).

23. See the essay "Trauma and Transference," in Memory, History, 117-37; quote on 123.

24. See Martin Broszat/Saul Friedländer, "A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism," Yad Vashem Studies 19 (1988): 1-47; quote on 7.

25. Ibid., 12-13.

26. Ibid., 41.

27. Thus, in discussing various modes of avoiding confrontation with this murderous past, Friedländer argues for a fundamental distinction between non-German and German strategies: "The fifteen or twenty years of 'latency' that followed the war in regard to talking or writing about the Shoah, particularly in the United States, should not be equated with massive repression exclusively, in contradistinction to the German scene." See "Trauma and Transference," 126.

28. Reflections of Nazism, 9-10. Though the book was greeted in general with great admiration, some objected to it precisely on the grounds that it was too psycho-symbolic and insufficiently historical. As one critic put it: "If Friedländer gets nowhere, it is because from start to finish he goes nowhere. Though he is a master of the neat phrase ... the substance of these observations tends to be trite and unhistoric. For instance, Hitler in victory sits on the mountain, in defeat he cowers in his bunker. That, according to Friedländer, is the 'parabola' of his career. Actually, Hitler took to his air raid shelter as early as the fall of 1940, during Molotov's visit to Berlin; and the subsequent locus operandi of the Fuehrer was determined not by the evolution of symbols but by the growth of allied air superiority ... the book has a lot to say about death worship, much of it quite out of context: Hitler's cult of the martyrs of his movement reflected no particular fixation, merely a commonplace practice to sugarcoat death as an act of heroism. For this there were so many models that one wonders whether this involved even conscious imitation." See Hans A. Schmitt, "Hitler: Obsession without End," The Sewanee Review 1 (Jan.-Mar. 1988): 165.

29. Reflections of Nazism, xi.

30. Ibid., xv; cf. 15-16: "The important thing is the constant identification of Nazism and death; not real death in its everyday horror and tragic banality, but a ritualized, stylized, and aestheticized death." On the juxtaposition of kitsch and death see 3ff. On the synthesis--kitsch death as "a means to digest the past"--see esp. 13.

31. Ibid., xvii.

32. See "The Shoah in Present Historical Consciousness," in Memory, History, 42.

33. Reflections of Nazism, 62.

34. "Some Aspects of the Historical Significance of the Holocaust," The Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 1 (Fall 1976): 37.

35. Ibid., 39.

36. Ibid.

37. See his "From Anti-Semitism to Extermination: A Historiographical Study of Nazi Policies toward the Jews and an Essay in Interpretation," Yad Vashem Studies 15 (1984): 16 (original emphasis).

38. "On the Unease in Historical Interpretation," 33. That may be so, but it is also true that, however sublimated, Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism was one of the first serious efforts to think through the grounds of the Jewish genocide. See my "Nazism, Culture and The Origins of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil," New German Critique, no. 70 (Winter 1997): 117-39.

39. "From Anti-Semitism to Extermination," 6.

40. See the splendid Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (New York, 1997), 4. Friedländer's always carefully differentiated analyses differ in fundamental ways, of course, from Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's work which he curtly dismisses thus: "An interpretation of the events assuming the widespread presence in German society at large, throughout the modern era, of an 'eliminationist anti-Semitism,' craving the physical annihilation of the Jews, is not convincing on the basis of the material presented in this study" (387 n. 53).

41. See "From Anti-Semitism to Extermination," 3ff. for this discussion.

42. "The Shoah in Present Historical Consciousness," 57.

43. "From Anti-Semitism to Extermination," 27-28, 49. Friedländer's sense of functionalism's affinity with Arendt's "banality of evil" thesis was later validated when its leading analyst Hans Mommsen wrote an introduction to a later German edition of the book. For the English version, see Mommsen's "Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann Trial," in his From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays in German History (Princeton, 1991): 254-78.

44. The literature on this is enormous. For an accessible analysis of the debate within the largest political and intellectual context, see Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1988).

45. See "A Conflict of Memories? The New German Debates About the 'Final Solution'," The Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 31 (New York, 1987), 7.

46. Ibid., 8.

47. Ibid., 9-10.

48. Ibid., 12.

49. Ibid., 14-15.

50. "West Germany and the Burden of the Past: The Ongoing Debate," The Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 42 (Spring 1987): 9-10.

51. See Martin Broszat, "A Plea for the Historicization of National Socialism," in Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past: Hitler, The Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate (Boston, 1990), 77-87. The article appeared originally in German in 1985. Baldwin's volume also includes Friedländer's "Some Reflections on the Historicization of National Socialism" (88-101). Their famous correspondence is also republished there (102-134). This is not the place to go into the rights and wrongs of their debate. It must be mentioned here, however, that already in his first letter, Broszat insisted that such singularity would not go away for National Socialism itself provided a sufficient guarantee by the very magnitude of its crimes. See "A Controversy," 4-5.

52. I have analyzed both these correspondences in my Culture and Catastrophe, chaps. 5 and 6 respectively.

53. "A Controversy," 39.

54. Ibid., 29-30.

55. Ibid., 20-21, for these respective quotes.

56. Ibid., 25-26.

57. Ibid., 27-28.

58. Ibid., 38.

59. See his respectful piece written after Broszat's death, "Martin Broszat and the Historicization of National Socialism," in Memory, History, 95. It should be noted that Friedländer has lately considerably modified his opposition to what he took to be a crucial methodological tool of historicization--Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life)--and his suspicion that it essentially served "normalizing" tendencies. Indeed, in his new book, Nazi Germany and the Jews, the use of such a method precisely for illuminating a Friedländerian perspective is explicitly acknowledged: "Nazi persecutions and exterminations were perpetrated by ordinary people who lived and acted within a modern society not unlike our own, a society that had produced them as well as the methods and instruments for the implementation of their actions; the goals of these actions, however, were formulated by a regime, an ideology, and a political culture that were anything but commonplace. It is the relationship between the uncommon and the ordinary, the fusion of the widely shared murderous potentialities of the world that is also ours and the peculiar frenzy of the Nazi apocalyptic drive against the mortal enemy, the Jew, that give both universal significance and historical distinctiveness to the 'Final Solution' of the Jewish Question" (6-7). In this book, Friedländer puts into practice his strictures concerning the role of the historian, the nature of narration, as well as some of the ways in which the debates between intentionalists and functionalists, and concerning historicization have been resolved in his mind and work.

60. Although it is not exhaustive, the most accessible and representative collection (his autobiography apart) of Friedländer's analyses of memory and history in general, and of German, Jewish and Israeli inscriptions in particular, is to be found in Memory, History.

61. For a general outline of these issues, see my Culture and Catastrophe, chap. 1.

62. See "The Shoah in Present Historical Consciousness," 48-49, 43, 47.

63. Memory, History, esp. introduction; chap. 1, "German Struggles with Memory"; and chap. 3, "The Shoah in Present Historical Consciousness," where he states: "Major catastrophes such as the Shoah become centrally significant for the collective self-perception of the groups directly involved in one way or another, while the reworking of these catastrophes through time mobilizes central symbolic systems at the disposal of these groups" (47).

64. Ibid., xii.

65. "German Struggles with Memory," 2.

66. See, for instance, his piece (with Adam Seligman), "The Israeli Memory of the Shoah: On Symbols, Rituals and Ideological Polarization," in Roger Friedland and Deirdre Boden, eds., Nowhere: Space, Time and Modernity (Berkeley, 1994): 356-71. See also "The Shoah in Present Historical Consciousness," 43-47.

67. Memory, History, xi-xii. It should be noted that I have concentrated in this essay on Friedländer's main areas of interest. He has, however, also pursued many other subjects--on international relations, French politics and so on. He has also written prominently on general issues related to Israeli society and the Palestinian-Arab-Israeli problem. See, for instance, the books Reflexions sur l'Avenir d'Israël (Paris, 1969); with Mahmud Hussein, Arabs and Israelis: A Dialogue (New York, 1978).

68. Memory, History, xii-xiii.

69. "West Germany and the Burden of the Past," 17.

70. See Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge, MA, 1992) which was edited by Friedländer and for which he wrote the introduction. The volume has had a considerable impact. For a more general discussion of the ways in which the intellectual atmosphere attendant upon a postmodernist sensibility affects the discussion on Nazism and the Shoah, see my Culture and Catastrophe, esp. 12ff.

71. Probing the Limits, 4-5.

72. On this point see "The Shoah in Present Historical Consciousness," 55.

73. Probing the Limits, 10 (original emphasis).

74. Ibid., 5.

75. "The Shoah in Present Historical Consciousness," 48.

76. Probing the Limits, 2.

77. "Some Aspects of the Historical Significance," 42.

78. "Trauma and Transference," 132. In many ways Friedländer has applied this technique in his new book--with striking success. We eagerly await the second volume.

79. Memory, History, x.

80. "Trauma and Transference," 134.

81. Probing the Limits, 2-3.

82. "The Shoah in Present Historical Consciousness," 49.

83. This is a pastiche of quotes drawn from Reflections of Nazism, 89ff.

84. "On the Unease in Historical Interpretation," 31 (original emphasis).

85. Reflections of Nazism, 106.

86. "On the Unease in Historical Interpretation," 32 (original emphasis).

87. Reflections of Nazism, 106.

88. "On the Unease in Historical Interpretation," 34.

89. "Trauma and Transference," 133.

90. "On the Unease in Historical Interpretation," 35.

91. "Trauma and Transference," 129.

92. Ibid., 131.

93. Ibid., 134.

94. "A Controversy," 30-31.

95. "Trauma and Transference," 131.

96. Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (London, 1989), 7.

97. See Hans Kellner, "'Never Again' is Now," History and Theory 33, no. 2 (1994): 127-44. See too chaps. 1 and 7 of my Culture and Catastrophe. Martin Broszat put it thus in a letter to Friedländer, concerning the latter's insistence that scientifically positive work had to keep the ideological and criminal dimensions of Nazism at the center: "the wish to prescribe what should or should not be done scientifically ... leads us astray, forcing us into a constrictive narrowing of the possibility to ask scientific questions." See "A Controversy," 34.

98. "German Struggles with Memory," 5-6.

99. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, 1993), 21.

100. Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History (New York, 1988), xiii.

101. For critical comments on this book, see Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge, 1992), chap. 4; and Culture and Catastrophe, 121-24.

102. See Culture and Catastrophe, chap. 7, esp. 124-25.

103. This new perspective on Auschwitz can be found in Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (New York, 1996).

104. Nazi Germany and the Jews, 3. Friedländer specifically distinguishes his "redemptive" anti-Semitism from Goldhagen's "exterminationist" notion and argues that the former "represented an ideological trend shared at the outset by a small minority only, and, in the Third Reich, by a segment of the party and its leaders, not by the majority of the population" (337 n. 6).

105. "Some Aspects of the Historical Significance," 41.

106. See Nazi Germany and the Jews, 42; also introduction and chap. 1.

107. Ibid., 157 (original emphasis).

108. See most prominently Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge, 1991). See also Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995).

109. See Wulf Kansteiner, "From Exception to Exemplum: The New Approach to Nazism and the 'Final Solution'," History and Theory 33, no. 2 (1994): 161. Friedländer's "inverted specificity of the event," he argues, "tends to undermine its own foundation whenever the notion of opaqueness and uneasiness solidifies." Therefore Friedländer "links the inexplicability of the Holocaust alternatively to the event as 'inherent in the phenomenon itself,' or presents it as a subjective value judgment, arrived at a posteriori" (151).

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